by Nami Mun
“I can’t,” I said, right away. “My family’s in town.”
“That’s cool. Who’s all here?”
I flipped through the cassettes and made up two quirky parents, successful cousins, and an uncle who treated us to lobster dinners and Broadway shows. “Dad gets up to sing songs about the Korean War, and Mom always has one glass too many and kisses him in front of everybody. I don’t get to see them much,” I added. Lying to Benny was easy because I knew he didn’t believe a word of my story. It was still a good lie, though.
“Right.” Benny nodded, his lips tight and disappointed. Rubbing the back of his neck, he said, “You know, we’re supposed to help each other out.”
That night I went home and swallowed a small vial of pills I’d lifted from the home, plus four Cokes and about thirty Pop Rocks, which took a while to tear open, the packets being so waxy and glazed. I got into my sleeping bag and waited, for what I didn’t know—my stomach to explode, maybe. Outside a car radio faded by as some woman shouted drunken words into the air. Benny would be across the street, getting ready for the meeting.
Twenty minutes passed and I felt nothing, except a tickling in my throat and chest. I tried smothering myself with a pillow, kicked my feet like I was being murdered and tried to slip into unconsciousness from the lack of oxygen, but I wasn’t even sleepy. Finally, I went to my pay phone and called the operator. I told the nasal voice that we had an emergency, that a friend of mine had swallowed a vial of—I held it up and spelled the name out for her—and asked if it was fatal. I didn’t mention the Pop Rocks. After a few beeps a different voice came on, a man’s voice, and he explained that we were dealing with antibiotics, for urinary tract infections. I thanked him, hung up, and then called my dad.
The phone rang five times before he picked up.
“Hello?” he answered, again in Korean. Some song was moaning in the background.
I slid a packet of Pop Rocks into my mouth and held the receiver close to the sizzle on my tongue. I started chewing.
“Who is this?” he asked. He said something else, too, but I couldn’t hear with all the crackling in my mouth. I swallowed.
There was some rustling on his end—voices warped in and out, his and a woman’s, maybe—before the music stopped suddenly. I pictured his short froggy legs having walked up to a stereo so he could press stop on the tape deck. When my father came back, he spoke low and determined: “I know who you are, and . . . let me just say how sorry I am. You don’t need excuses. Nobody does. I’ll have it by next week, and that’s all there is to it. I know I’ve said this before, but this time I promise. On my life.”
He went on like that and I left his words alone. I wondered what type of a loan shark he was mistaking me for. A large one, I hoped. Someone who could beat him up easily, break a bone or two. Take a moral inventory of your soul, my sponsor chimed in. Leaning against the wall, I focused on the sound of my father’s breathing and thought about how the only word he’d said in English was “excuses,” as if to blame his weakness on America. The Pop Rocks were now bombing my stomach and a string of antibiotics shot up my throat. I listened to my father apologize one more time before I hung up.
Friday night was rib night for Ray. From the nurses’ station I walked past doorways flickering sheets of television light, and headed toward the smoke room, where Ray was pulling out a cigarette. Surrounded by walls made of green-tinted glass, the smoke room looked more like a dried-up aquarium, embedded with ashtray stands, oxygen tanks, and old people made of cloth. Tomorrow they were cutting off his leg.
I tapped on the glass and mouthed, “You ready?”
Since chewing ribs was out of the question for him, I shredded the meat into a blender, with extra barbecue sauce, so he could drink his meal through a straw.
Ray slurped in bed, on top of the covers. I could see on the arch of his foot the blister, now the size of a pocket watch, a crater filled with a velvety gel. I wanted to grab a spoon and scoop it out. I almost asked if it hurt but even that sounded like a promise, and who was I to be making promises?
“You’re gonna have to drink up. I think they’re picking you up soon,” I said, walking over to the room’s only window. It was starting to snow.
Ray drank silently. He held the glass with both hands and stared at the footboard as if the bed itself had done him wrong. He wouldn’t look at me, and I took that to mean that he knew I wasn’t going with him.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, and headed for the door.
“My pillow needs adjusting.” He watched the TV screen even though it was off. Ray was nearly seventy but his hard blue eyes belonged to a jilted child. I returned to his bed, clicked down the rail and leaned him forward, not so gently, puffed up the pillows and set him back down.
“There,” I said, and started for the door again.
“And I want to take this.” With the straw still in his mouth he pointed to a book on his nightstand, a photo book about battleships. I packed it into a plastic bag he used to carry his overnight clothes.
“Okay, I’ll be back,” I said, rushing out. I stood out in the hallway and let the door close behind me.
“No you won’t,” I heard him say.
I ran home, drowning in snow. I passed random signs: Sunoco, the A&P, Yangtze River Buffet—but I couldn’t see the message in any of them. I had created a new life for myself but didn’t know what to do with it. Like staring at a finished jigsaw puzzle, where the only thing left to do was to mess it up again. Why couldn’t Ray see that? Why didn’t he understand that the more he asked of me, the more I realized how useless I was, how little I belonged in the normal world? I thought about my father, how maybe he’d felt the same. He didn’t belong to this country, to his wife, to his daughter who spoke sentences that sounded like slimy marbles. I couldn’t have sympathy for him, though. Or I didn’t want to. He was my father. I might’ve left my mother, but he was my father and he’d left us first.
The snow kept coming, erasing the city, trying to make all things equal and white, except on the boulevard, where cars drew themselves a railway of slush. It was cold. The wind was freezing my face into a mask. A bus roared by, giving me a blur of greenish windows and an ad for Irish Spring below them. When my father had first seen the commercial—a man carving a bar of soap with a jackknife—he thought it was an ad for the knife and didn’t see what the big deal was, a knife cutting up a bar of soap. Knives from Korea can cut any soap, he said. My mother laughed, and I did, too, but wives and daughters weren’t supposed to laugh at fathers. He dragged me by the hair to a playground near our home and ordered me to hang from the chin-up bar. We had changed countries but he didn’t want to change. He slid his belt out from his pants and whipped me in front of all the kids in the park. Most were my age. They watched from their seesaws and swings but I couldn’t look at them, at least not in the eyes. I studied the barrel buttons on their coats, their galoshes paused on a hopscotch square. I looked beyond the playground’s chain-link fence, out onto Eastchester Road, where small heads inside buses and cars streamed past, all of them in profile, looking straight ahead and not seeing a goddamn thing.
That night, with my father on the phone, I stood holding a kitchen knife over my wrist. With the sound of him apologizing into my ear, begging for one more day, I took a deep breath and thought, Free the veins.
“Hello? Are you still there?” my father asked, and I sliced.
The knife clanged as it hit the concrete floor, and the phone swung from my shoulder. I looked at the damage. It was nothing more than a paper cut, the thin line of blood pearling on my wrist looking more like jewelry than death closing in. Still, I was sweating, could feel my heart fighting, and I wanted to scream but couldn’t with my father still on the phone. I picked him up again. “Please, I’m begging you,” he said, or something like that, and this time I steadied my wrist against the phone and leaned forward on one leg so I could use the force of my weight to slice down harder. My hands were shaking. I l
ined up the blade into the line of the cut. “I’ll give you everything I have,” he cried as I took in a breath and closed my eyes. I had no head, no legs, not even a body. All that existed was the sting on my wrist and a floating image of Ray lying in a hospital bed with some doctor standing over him, preparing to saw off his leg. I exhaled for as long as I could and waited for courage to strike.
When I heard the knocking I thought it was coming from my father’s end. I opened my eyes and saw my reflection on the phone. With my bangs covered in sweat, I didn’t recognize myself.
“Who is it?” I whispered. Nobody answered, which made me realize I was nowhere near the door.
“Hello?” my father said in my ear. “Who is this?” he asked, in English this time, and he didn’t sound scared anymore. He was back to his old self, acting as if the world owed him something.
“I gotta go, Dad,” I said, hanging up.
I didn’t care who was at the door, what they had or what they were going to do to me when I let them in. The fact that it was Benny didn’t surprise me any. He didn’t ask questions—he just stood there, not minding the cold and letting me hug and kiss him as if I owned him, as if I had every right in the world to dig into his body and hide forever. I let him in, and into my sleeping bag, and just before we were about to make love, he rolled out his gear.
The syringe. The lighter. The shoe polish. The bottom of a soda can. As the fleck of shoe polish disappeared into our chunks, and our chunks, the size of two Tic Tacs, disappeared into our water, my father’s struggles here became clear to me. The country was new and strange. It unanchored him. But the liquor was the same, and his habits were the same. He merely drifted toward things familiar—drinking, cheating—paths that never questioned who he was and why he was there. And who was I to judge. The sweat on my arm turned as cold as seashells, and I waited for Benny to set up my hit but told him I’d shoot it myself since we didn’t know each other that well.
And when the rush speared my veins, freeing every muscle, I gasped what must’ve been a skyful of air and let the warm piss flow out of me. I let it soak my underwear, my sleeping bag, and maybe Benny, who was now lying by my side in his own world of faith. The hit took me wherever I wanted. I ever tell you about the Parachute Jump? Ray had asked once. We were at the bench, smoking. It’s in Coney Island. They called it Brooklyn’s Eiffel Tower. You sit on this thing and they pull you up by cable, so high I swear you’re making deals with God. He turned his head toward me. He thought I’d said something but I hadn’t. That’s where I met Helen, my wife. She and I got paired to go up that thing. She wasn’t the prettiest, but that hair... it was so red against that big blue sky, and all the way up she giggled and smiled at me, like we’d already done things our parents would’ve killed us for. Then BAM! The next thing you know, I saw my future in those eyes of hers. I just did. I heard our kids laughing her laugh. The Thanks-giving dinners, the trips to the Grand Canyon. He took a drag of his cigarette and let out a long trail. Now, where the fuck is she when I need her? He dumped out the plastic bag and let the crumbs snow on the birds. Where the fuck is she?
“I’m here,” I told the ceiling.
“What?” Benny asked, before falling into a fit of laughter that echoed as I seesawed up to the invisible sun, above the birds of Coney Island where the Parachute Jump pulled me to the top until the noise of the board-walk below faded and all I could hear was the sound of my heart and the wind rattling the cables. I looked over an ocean that was as blue as the sky and said, I’m right here.
In the Tombs
This was what I remembered.
That once I found my mother lying completely still in our vegetable garden, between rows of napa cabbage and pickling cucumbers. She hadn’t changed out of her nurse’s uniform—white shoes, white stockings, a long-sleeved white dress that stopped just above her knees. The left side of her nursing cap was bobby-pinned to her hair but the right side had come undone, as if that spot on her skull had erupted and blown the cap off onto the dirt. The sun had reddened her eyelids, her forearms, the hands that clasped her Bible to her chest. I was maybe seven years old, and I wasn’t worried. I’d seen her like this before. Every time my father left us. And every time she kicked him out. Once, I’d found her in our bathtub, with no water, fully dressed, pearl earrings, makeup, and dinner party shoes, again with the Bible. Another time, under our dinette set, her arms as stiff as sticks by her side, the Bible butterflied open on her face, as if she were trying to breathe in the words. Both times I sat beside her and played jacks or made origami flowers or quizzed myself with flashcards, until she woke up.
But this was the first time she had pretended to be dead outside our home. An ant crawled up the tracks of her white zipper, which ran along the center of her chest and opened to a V at the base of her neck, following the lines of her collarbone. I tickled her chin and laughed at the possibility of her laughing, but when she didn’t, I thought nothing of it. I plopped down and played in the dirt, made mounds of mud, dug up tiny pebbles and lined them up like pearls around her neck. I placed my hand on her tummy and piled the mud high on top of that hand before pulling my hand out slowly, leaving behind a tall brown igloo. Using the stem of a cucumber plant, I poked a hole at the opposite end, turning the igloo into a tunnel, through which the tracks of her zipper traveled. I piled dirt onto her legs to make mountain ridges and clumped mud on both of her shoes to build twin volcanoes. Families made of sticks and stems lived along her body, which was surrounded by towers of cucumber until the flash flood came (with the help of a watering can) and drowned my little village.
The sky turned twilight and all the townspeople were dead. And my mother lay still through it all. It was getting dark. A part of me thought to wake her up but that was the most time I’d spent with her in a while. A few lines of mud streaked her face. Still, she looked beautiful. My father had once said she was too beautiful but he had said it like it was a curse. Somebody in the neighborhood started cooking fish, and the smell made me think it was time to go inside.
I nudged her shoulder. She didn’t wake up. A light came on across our driveway, and a second later Mrs. McCommon, our next-door neighbor, appeared in her kitchen window. She stood over the sink, rinsing something, and her eyes took snapshots of us as she talked on the phone, her head tilted to one side to keep the receiver from slipping. She laughed, and her lips stretched like a rubber band being pulled. It seemed fair to hate her. I looked up. No stars and no clouds, the sky was a sheet of cellophane, showing off a shade of blue that made everything below it—our garden, our driveway, my mother’s skin—seem bruised and untouchable. I couldn’t see the moon. I went inside.
Without washing my hands, I ate shrimp-flavored chips while hopping on the couch, from cushion to cushion. When I got bored with that, I put on Swan Lake, raised the volume to ten, and twirled through the house until I was sticky with sweat and the needle on the turntable skated the center, filling my head with static. I climbed our carpeted stairs and slid down on my ass to the beat of that static, and when I got tired of that, I hugged my bag of chips and watched TV. Happy Days was on but I couldn’t concentrate. She’d never pretended this long.
I snuck into the kitchen, kept the light off, climbed up onto the counter, and peeked out the window with my forehead touching the cold glass. There she was. In her white uniform she looked like a patch of snow melting in the dirt. Except for the light from Mrs. McCommon’s front porch, the garden was dark. I fogged up the windowpane and drew a rectangle around her body. My mother was the size of my pencil case. I wondered what would happen if she had to pee. She would have to move for that. A car coughed and crawled onto our driveway, backed out, and climbed up the ramp for the Bruckner Expressway, where a siren sped past us, leaving a long echo.
Maybe that was what had woken her up. My mother’s legs broke through the dirt as she bent her knees and stood, blocking the porch light enough to draw a long shadow of herself on the dirt. With the light directly behind her, her
hair and face disappeared, and for a long second she looked headless. She didn’t brush off her uniform. She didn’t shake off her hair. She didn’t clap her hands clean. She just came up the back stairs and through the back kitchen door as if she were following a smell.
“I know what you did to me,” she said, passing by.
I know what you did to me.
This was what I thought about when my public defender told me that my mother was dead. We were in the interview room at the Manhattan Detention Complex, also known as the Tombs, and he said it so matter-of-factly that I wondered how big this news was and how big my reaction should or shouldn’t be. I couldn’t think. I was coming down from something and my brain felt like an old, chewed-up piece of gum. We were in a room the size of a car, with barely enough space for a table, two chairs, and a tall sign framed in plastic. The sign began with DETAINEE SHALL NOT ACCEPT . . . followed by a long list of prohibited items.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Am I sure what?”
“That she’s dead. Sometimes she fakes it.”
He looked through my folder. “She’s been dead for six months.”
“I guess that would be hard to pull off.” I said this and smiled a little to let him think I was joking. “I mean, that’s impossible, right?”
“You lost me.”
“To fake a death. That would be crazy, right?”
“I think so.”
“Yeah,” I said, but couldn’t shut up. “Are you sure she wasn’t breathing? You checked her pulse and everything?”
“Well, I wasn’t there, Joon.”
“Of course you weren’t. Nobody’s saying you were.” I sat up to show I was ready to move on, and by the way he shut my folder and folded his hands on top of it, I could tell he was ready, too. His name was Louis Burby, and he looked exactly like his name. Sweaty nose, veiny skin, small, newborn eyes. His head was shaped like an egg and it sat on top of his torso, which was basically a larger egg. I liked him because he always got me out, and because we swapped favors. He bought me smokes or Donettes or sometimes clothes from The Salvation Army. And I gave him my feet.
